The Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship expects to have a nearly full house when it completes its long-awaited move out of the Revolution Mill off Yanceyville Street to its new home at the former Carolina Steel facility on South Elm-Eugene.

Sam Funchess, CEO of the nonprofit small-business incubator, said he expects construction work at the donated building to be complete by the end of the month and moving day for Nussbaum tenants to be sometime in mid-June.

Funchess said that after two years of struggling to raise the $2.8 million it is costing to renovate the 60,000-square-foot building, he’s been relieved to find no “gotchas” lurking at the site that could have raised costs or delayed completion. The Nussbaum Center has been under pressure to relocate by the developers of its current home, Revolution Mill Studios, so that the 80,000 square feet it occupies there can eventually be upgraded to Class A office space.

“We’re finding it’s going pretty much like we planned,” Funchess said. “We’re within budget and on our timeline, and it looks like the accommodations we’ve designed are going to accomplish what we want to accomplish.”

Funchess said it appears the new site will be closer to fully occupied from the start than Nussbaum officials expected while planning for the relocation. The budget for the first year of operations there projects an occupancy rate of 65 percent, he said.

As of early this week, 36 of the 54 current tenants of the incubator had committed to moving to the new location, and those tenants would take up about 75 percent of the available square footage there. Two other sizable tenants are still considering whether to make the move, and if both do then the new building will be around 95 percent leased at opening, Funchess said.

“Moving is painful, but we’re trying to make it as easy as possible” by paying the relocation expenses of those staying with the incubator, at a total cost of around $80,000, he said.

Some companies choosing not to stay with the incubator are moving to other locations or will remain where they are in Revolution Mill. Funchess said he does not believe any Nussbaum tenants will shut down because of the move.

Jim Peeples, one of the developers of Revolution Mill Studios, said negotiations with those Nussbaum tenants who want to stay in place are under way.

Major renovation work at the sprawling 625,000-square-foot former Cone Mills textile factory of which the Nussbaum Center is a part has been on hold for more than a year for lack of financing. Peeples said the planned improvement to Class A space can’t go ahead until that financing is in place.

The vacating of the space by the Nussbaum Center “is one of the moving parts that may help us move that agenda forward,” Peeples said, though no breakthroughs appear to be imminent. “We’ve got a number of irons in the fire, but we’re not ready just yet.”